by Tom Holt
They were airborne.
‘Thor.’
‘Yes, Frey?’
‘Is it meant to be doing this?’
‘Doing what, precisely?’
Odin was poring over the map. In his left hand he had a magnifying glass, and in the right a compass.
‘Estimating our windspeed at thirty knots,’ he said, in a loud, clear voice, ‘that down there must be Budleigh Salterton.’
Frey turned and looked at him, vertigo temporarily pigeon-holed. ‘What did you say must be Budleigh Salterton?’
‘There,’ said Odin, pointing, ‘just below us now. I always was pretty clever at this dead reckoning stuff.’
‘You mean that there?’
‘Yes. Which means that, if we continue this course for another—’
‘That’s a cloud, Odin.’
‘No it’s not, don’t muck about. We’ve got a schedule to work to, remember?’
Thor and Frey suddenly remembered Odin’s thing about maps. It had slipped their memories until now precisely because, a very long time ago, they had induced Odin on pain of being gutted on his own altar never to so much as look at another map for as long as the world existed. For his part Odin knew for a certainty that he was an excellent map reader, but the landscapes mucked him about by moving around when he wasn’t looking. Other things that mucked Odin around included doors, piles of cans in supermarkets and all known electrical appliances.
‘If it’s not a cloud,’ Frey persisted, ‘how come it’s grey and wispy and you can see the ground straight through it?’
Odin sat still for a moment, staring at the map and chewing the end of a pencil. The pencil in question had once been part of a pen-and-pencil set presented by God the Father to God the Son on the occasion of his passing his Religious Education O-level. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘Budleigh Salterton is somewhere over there.’ He waved an arm in a circle round his head. ‘So I make it that if we carry on the way we’re going, we should be in Papua by nightfall.’
‘Since when,’ Thor interrupted over the clatter of the turboprops, ‘did we want to go to Papua? Come to that, where is it exactly?’
‘Now you’re the one doing the kidding around.’
‘Straight up,’ said Thor. ‘I had this mate, you see, who was really into hang-gliding. He could read a course off a map sooner than you could say Jack Robinson.’
‘Who’s Jack Robinson?’
‘He’s a figure of speech.’
‘Oh,’ said Frey. ‘One of them.’
‘It’s in the middle of the Indian Ocean,’ said Odin, holding the map about an inch from the tip of his nose. ‘Principal exports include—’
‘Yes, but why do you want to go there?’
Odin looked up. ‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘All I said was, if we carry on this line till nightfall, that’s where we’ll fetch up.’
‘Oh I see,’ Frey said, ‘it wasn’t an announcement, it was a warning.’
‘Would you mind shutting up for a moment, please,’ Odin said. ‘Only I am trying to navigate here, and it’s never easy at the best of times.’
‘So don’t fly at the best of times,’ Frey replied. ‘In fact, not flying at all would be all right with me. Have either of you two noticed how far we are off the ground?’
‘For pity’s sake, Frey,’ Odin said, not looking up, ‘don’t be such a baby. Are you chicken or something?’
Frey scowled. ‘I am a god, remember. I can be anything I jolly well like. Only I’d prefer to do it down there, if it’s all the same to you.’
Thor sighed. ‘You know,’ he said, gazing out over the kingdoms of the earth, spread out before him like items of kit at an army inspection, ‘I used to be really good at this. Flying around and stuff. Only somehow,’ he went on, biting his lip, ‘somehow I’m not sure I can still—’
‘Don’t be so feeble,’ Odin replied. ‘It’s not something you forget; it’s like riding a bicycle.’
‘Sure,’ Frey muttered. ‘You wobble about for a while and then you hit the ground.’
‘That’s not what I meant at all.’
‘And anyway, when was the last time you ever rode a bicycle?’
‘Don’t change the—’
‘Come to that, have you ever ridden a bicycle at all? Ever?’
‘Loads of times.’
‘Name one.’
‘Look,’ Odin said, struggling to pull together the various strands of his thought processes, ‘this isn’t about riding bicycles, this is about flying. And here we are doing it. And we know exactly where we . . .’
For ever afterwards, the locals of that part of Cornwall referred to the rocky outcrop into which the Aesir now flew as Shooting Star Hill. The giant crater formed by the crash became a popular venue for outings and picnics, and attractive colour postcards are available at several local newsagents.
‘What,’ said Frey, struggling to his knees and spitting out earth, ‘happened?’
‘Easy mistake to make,’ replied a voice, conceivably Odin’s, emanating from the upper branches of a fir tree. ‘Could have happened to anybody.’
‘Will somebody please get this traction engine off me?’
‘Low cloud,’ Odin went on, ‘and a damn great pointy hill; you’re bound to have accidents sooner or later. Whoever created this region had absolutely no consideration whatsoever for the safety of air traffic. In fact I’ve a good mind—’
‘But you keep it for special occasions,’ interrupted Thor, from under the engine. ‘Look, stop fartarsing about, you two, and get me out of here.’
‘Yes,’ grumbled Frey, grabbing hold of the front fender and heaving, ‘but what happened?’ To the gods all things are possible, and their strength has nothing to do with muscle and sinew; rather, they draw power from the earth, the sky, the sea. ‘Don’t just stand there, you prune,’ he shouted at Odin, who had made it down from his tree and was scrabbling about for his map, ‘grab the other end of this before I drop it on my toe.’
‘Coming.’
‘Too late.’
‘When you’ve quite finished larking about,’ said Thor’s voice, from some way down, ‘perhaps you’d get on with the job in hand.’
‘All right, just give me a minute, will you?’
‘The sooner I get out, you see, the sooner I can kick Odin’s arse from here to Christmas.’
Between them, Odin and Frey manhandled the hundred-ton machine out of the way, rested it gently on the ground and rescued Thor, who had made a man-shaped hole of the kind usually only seen in Tom and Jerry cartoons.
‘Are you saying,’ Frey enquired, ‘that he managed to fly us straight into the side of this mountain?’
‘Actually,’ Odin said, ‘she’s not that badly damaged. Not badly damaged at all. Front wing’s a bit the worse for wear, but a few minutes with the lump hammer and you’d never know it was there.’
The reason why gods never fight among themselves is quite simply the futility of the exercise, combined with the prodigious danger to the environment. Two all-powerful, immortal, invulnerable beings going at it hammer and tongs are guaranteed to damage absolutely everything within a fifty-mile radius, with the sole exception of each other.
‘Lump hammer, did you say?’
‘That’s the ticket, Thor. Just pass it over, would you?’
‘On its way.’
Five minutes or so later, Frey (who had found the packed lunch and eaten the honey and raisin sandwiches and two of the chocolate mini-rolls) got up, wandered across the now considerably enlarged crater and stirred one of the two recumbent forms with his toe.
‘All right, chaps,’ he said. ‘Now you’ve got that out of your systems, shall we be cutting along?’
‘Good idea.’
‘Where to, exactly?’
CHAPTER FOUR
‘Yes,’ said the thug. ‘As a matter of fact, I am a doctor.
What’s it to you, prune-face?’
‘Oh.’ Minerva, former Roman goddess of Wisdom, blinked.
Vague thought-shapes swirled in her brain, struggling to fight their way through the fog and the mist. ‘You don’t,’ she quavered, ‘look much like a doctor to me.’
‘Shows how much you know, you daft old bag,’ the doctor replied. ‘Now sod off, will you, there’s a love, because we’ve got things to do.’
Minerva hesitated. The next line was welling up in her mouth, the words that she always said to everybody; but somehow, for once, they didn’t seem appropriate, and she wasn’t even sure why she wanted to say them. Nevertheless, she did.
‘I shouldn’t be here, you know,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t be here at all.’
The second thug, who was also a doctor, grinned. ‘Too bloody right,’ he said. ‘In a pine box ten feet under’s where you should be. Now sling your hook.’
‘I’m terribly ill, you know,’ Minerva said, or at least her lips shaped the words. Prompted by a massive sense of danger, her mind, what was left of it, was doing something it hadn’t done since Machiavelli was an adolescent. It was thinking. Little flashes of electricity were crawling along the overgrown, corroded synapses of her brain. ‘By rights,’ she went on saying in the meanwhile, ‘I should be in a hospital.’
‘Let go of my sleeve or you will be.’
Two intrepid electrical discharges met in a jungle of decaying silicone somewhere in Minerva’s cortex. It was like Livingstone and Stanley; and the one who might have been Livingstone might have said Another fine mess you’ve gotten me into, because the next words Minerva uttered were comparatively rational but factually incorrect.
‘You’re not a doctor,’ she said.
‘Get stuffed.’
The first thug, who really was a doctor, gave her a shove and she sat down heavily on an aged sofa, twisting her knee. Thirty centuries of outraged divinity suddenly woke up and screamed at her to turn this arrogant little mortal into a beetle. She tried it. She missed.
‘Come on, Vern,’ said the second doctor. ‘Let’s get it over with and get out of this dump.’ He strode forward, not aware that in doing so he’d stepped on Inanna, the great goddess of Uruk, who went splat!
In the corridor that led from the day room to Lilac Wing, a nurse blocked their path.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘but who are you and what are you doing?’
‘We’re doctors.’
‘Nobody told me anything about any doctors.’
‘So bloody what?’
The nurse, who was the same Sandra who had managed to make Osiris eat hot custard, moved her feet slightly, making it impossible for the two men to brush past her without actually knocking her over. ‘May I ask what you’re here for?’
The two doctors looked at each other. Because they really were doctors, and had therefore served their time as the lowest form of life in a busy hospital, they still had buried deep in their psyches the basic fear of nurses that all doctors carry with them to the grave. This fear springs from the subconscious belief that the nurse knows a damn sight more about what’s going on than they do, and for two pins will show them up in front of the patient.
‘We’re here to see someone.’
‘Oh yes? And who might that be?’
The first doctor glanced at the back of his hand, where he’d written the name in biro. ‘It’s a Mr O’Syres,’ he said. ‘We’re here to—’
‘To give him a medical,’ the second doctor interrupted.
‘That’s right, a medical.’ The first doctor started to feel better; this was convincing stuff. He decided to expand it. ‘He’s thinking of taking out some life insurance,’ he went on, ‘and so we were asked—’
‘You’re sure about that?’
‘Course we’re sure.’
‘Life insurance?’
‘That’s right, love, so if you’ll just show us the way.’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Sandra. ‘Just follow me.’
She led them to the big broom cupboard and opened the door a crack.
‘This is Mr Osiris’ room,’ she said. ‘I won’t put the light on because he’s asleep at the moment. If you just go in quietly and wait for him to wake up.’
As soon as they were inside, she turned the key and ran for it.
By the time she’d reached Osiris’ room, the penny had dropped. Two doctors. What is it that needs two doctors? Easy. She pushed open the door.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Sorry.’
She hadn’t actually seen Mr Osiris without any clothes on before. True, she’d heard things about him; how he’d undergone a lot of surgery in the past, had all sorts of bits removed and so on. She wouldn’t have been worried by scars. Zip fasteners, though, were another matter.
‘For pity’s sake,’ Osiris said, reaching for a towel. ‘You could have given me a heart attack.’
‘Sorry.’
Osiris looked down at the middle of his chest, and grinned. ‘Weren’t expecting to see that, were you?’
‘No,’ Sandra admitted. ‘Doesn’t it get rusty when you have a bath?’
Osiris shook his head. ‘Stainless steel,’ he replied. ‘I had them put in to make it easier for my wife.’
‘Ah.’
‘Was there something you wanted?’
Sandra’s brain dropped back into gear. ‘Get dressed, quick, and I’ll help you into your wheelchair,’ she said. ‘There’s two doctors come to certify you.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Certify you,’ Sandra hissed, grabbing a dressing gown and shoving it on to his lap. ‘Say you’re mad. I’ve locked them in a broom cupboard.’
Despite the ravages of time, Osiris still retained a fair proportion of the vast mental capacity required of a supreme being. He scowled.
‘It’s that little bugger Julian,’ he growled. ‘You wait till I get my hands on him, I’ll make him wish—’
‘Quickly!’
She helped bundle Osiris into some clothes and got him into the chair. The corridor was empty.
‘Typical bloody lawyer’s trick,’ Osiris was muttering under his breath. ‘Have me certified and then take over all my powers with one of those damned attorney things. I knew I should never have signed it.’
‘That’s awful,’ Sandra replied absently. ‘If we can just make it to the service elevator, we’ll have a clear run out the back to the car park.’
‘Mind you,’ Osiris went on, ‘you’ve got to hand it to him for brains. Chip off the old block in that respect. Mind out, you nearly had me into the wall there.’
‘Stop complaining.’
As they passed the door of the broom cupboard, they could hear the sound of strong fists on woodwork and, alas, intemperate language. It looked to be a pretty solid door, but that wasn’t something you could rely on. Never trust something that was once a tree, Osiris reflected. He’d met a lot of trees in his career as a nature god, and had learned a thing or two about them in the process. One: don’t sit under them in thunderstorms. Two: never lend them money.
‘All clear.’
‘Hold on a moment,’ Osiris said. ‘Where exactly is it we’re going?’
Sandra glowered at him impatiently. ‘Somewhere you’ll be safe, of course,’ she said. ‘Look, they’ll be out of there in no time at all, so do you mind if—’
‘Where? ’
‘My mum’s, of course.’
‘Ah,’ said Osiris. ‘Right.’
‘Is there somebody in there?’
The first thug, who was of course a doctor and therefore well aware of which of the small bones in his hand he’d broken while banging furiously on the door, stopped hammering and yelled, ‘Yes! Let us out!’
There was a pause.
‘Are you a doctor?’ said the voice.
‘What do you mean,’ said Julian, ‘escaped?’
The first thug pressed a coin into the slot, taking advantage of the hiatus in the conversation to choose his words with care. ‘He got away,’ he said. ‘One of the nurses locked us in a cupboard. When we got out . . .’ He shuddered. It had taken a lo
ng time, and he was still getting nightmare flashbacks from the conversation he’d had with Minerva through the door. ‘When we got out, he wasn’t in his room. We searched the whole place from top to bottom. He’s legged it.’
‘Wheeled it,’ suggested his colleague, shortly before collapsing against the side of the phone booth with severe abdominal pains. Since he was of course a doctor, he could have told you the technical name for them.
‘You buggered it up, you mean?’
‘Yes,’ admitted the first doctor; then, recalling who he was talking to, added, ‘without prejudice, of course.’
‘Fine,’ said Julian, after a while. ‘I do hope for your sakes that you’re heavily insured, because I happen to specialise in medical negligence claims.’
‘Hey,’ said the second thug, grabbing the receiver, ‘that’s not fair, we were only . . . Why are you laughing?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Julian replied, ‘it’s that word you just said, fair. Always has that effect on me. Now listen, you find him and get him committed like immediately, or the two of you’ll find yourselves having trouble getting work as snake oil salesmen, let alone doctors, kapisch?’
‘Now hang about,’ shouted the second doctor, and the pips went.
‘Damn,’ said his colleague. ‘Now what do we do?’
‘What the man says would be favourite. Any idea how we go about it?’
‘No.’
‘And you call yourself a doctor.’
‘Shut up.’
Situated in its own extensive grounds among acres of rolling cloudland, Sunnyvoyde commands extensive views over three galaxies, but is a bit of a cow to get to if you have to rely on public transport. Add a wheelchair into the equation, and x suddenly equals extreme difficulty.
‘You’re sure there’s a bus?’ Osiris demanded. He was starting to feel the cold.
‘Of course there’s a bus. How do you think I get to work every day?’
‘And what is a bus exactly?’ Osiris wrinkled his omniscient brow. ‘I mean, I’ve heard of them, of course, but I don’t think I’ve ever actually seen one. After my time, really.’